Merchants, as part of their business strategy of keeping customers and fostering customer loyalty, make contributions to local charities based on the specific needs of their customers as a percentage of sales to those customers. This charitable contribution is made possible by the merchant selling to the charity bearer certificates for redemption at the merchant's store for the merchant's goods. These bearer certificates are sold at a discount from the face value to the charity. The charity in turn sells those bearer certificates to its benefactors at full face value. The benefactors then use the bearer certificates at that specific merchant that issued the certificates.
This approach to raising charitable funds involves fund raisers' effort and has effort and inconveniences on the part of others built into it. For example, the benefactors have to buy these bearer certificates in bulk by paying cash to the charity and thus laying out funds in advance. The charity acts as a middle man and has to find and convince benefactors to buy these certificates to help the charity. The merchant has to print the bearer charity certificates and track them from selling to charity to until they are cashed by the benefactor.
An objective of the present invention is to eliminate the charity's role as a middle man in buying certificates from the merchant and selling them to the benefactor.
Another objective is to eliminate a benefactor's need to buy the certificates in advance and shell out large cash in advance.
Yet another objective is to eliminate the merchant's effort in having to print, sell and redeem and thus track the certificates.
Yet another objective is to enable those charities that do not participate in this approach of fund raising to participate in this approach by eliminating the effort on the charity's part of buying and selling charity certificates of a merchant.
Yet another objective is to achieve substantial reduction in effort and cost for the benefactor, the charity and the merchant by automating the system at the local and national level.